Category: aside

  • reviewing software engineering for scientists – sourmash

    Apropos of software engineering for scientists, I had the opportunity to be a reviewer for C. Titus Brown‘s JOSS publication of sourmash, is a pretty cool Python library around some very fast C code for computing (and comparing) MinHash sketches on (gene) sequences. My critique of sourmash is marked “minor revisions only” because the core…

  • spelling be hard

    I’ve written a half dozen pieces of commentary on David Donoho’s work, all the while spelling his name wrong; at least once in a permalink URL. Oh, well.  At least I can edit the posts here.

  • Orlando

    I was going to post a follow up entry or two on data science, but then a red-blooded American homophobic terrorist went and murdered fifty people in Orlando with a military weapon, because they were GLBTQ, or because they were Latinx, or both. And another one got stopped on his way to Pride in LA,…

  • IDEs are Code Smell

    Some wise thoughts from my complementary-distribution doppelganger Bill McNeill, currently occupying our ecological niche in Austin: IDE-independence has a lot of advantages.

  • RMarkdown notebooks with Jupyter front-end

    Hey, nifty. I just found out that you can write RMarkdown-style literate Python files and use the Jupyter notebook environment to view and execute them (with the notedown package, which also allows you to edit them in place).  This has nice implications for source control — changes to ipython notebooks are pretty ugly.

  • Leaving LA

    “Data Science” in this era, like “Cognitive Science” in the nineties, seems to be several intellectual neighborhoods in search of a city.

  • don’t say I didn’t warn you

    Apropos of this collaboration model thinking, I note that Doug Cutting is looking to “rock band” after all.

  • Where’s Jeremy?

    Content has been sparse here. I’ve been preoccupied with events out in the Big Room: I’ve taken on the role of Senior Computational Linguist at Quid, and my wife Dorothy and I are moving to Seattle. I’ll be returning to San Francisco four days a month to work on-site at Quid, and she’ll be returning…

  • Gauss is my shepherd

    So this happened: I said this over on Twitter, but it’s too good not to record again here: The alt-text suggests that Munroe’s EM draws Gods from a normal distribution. (A Gaussian!) (did you know there’s an entire website dedicated to explaining XKCD to the great unwashed?  I think if you have to explain it, it’s…

  • Bay to Breakers 2011

    I’ve signed up for Bay to Breakers 2011 on Sunday. It’s the 100th Bay to Breakers race across San Francisco.  I’m in Corral C (criterion: 12km under 90 minutes), which isn’t pushing too hard. Unfortunately, at least one of the people who was supposed to run with me is making noises about backing out (“debilitating…